Sorry for the spotty communication over these last few weeks of May. We have made some improvements that we hope will bear fruit in the second half of the year. When it started to look likely that some of the new improvement projects would pay off it became clear that our back office procedures would not be able to keep up with the volume of watches we would be able to handle. At the moment I only feel comfortable speaking in generalities as I wish to demonstrate our improved capabilities should they actually materialize rather than get anyone’s hopes up.

Specifically though:

Procedural changes: Effectively immediate we will no longer use the Mk II CSP to update customer order status’. We will be relying on the E-boutique’s systems for that. For those of you that have open tickets for existing orders, we will be notifying your personally as we begin work on your orders. For new customers we will just be updating the E-boutique with the ship dates and emailing you the updates via the E-boutique. We will keep the CSP running to handle our email correspondence, handle repairs (which are separate from the E-boutique) and other communications. We plan to re-organize the Mk II CSP, to be completed early next year, in order to make it easier for our customers to contact us and also to keep up with technological changes.

“Awaiting Scheduling”: Those with orders awaiting scheduling will begin receiving their ship dates this week. The lead times are as advertised on the site, based on the date the order was placed, but we have had to update/streamline our scheduling procedure for changes we expect to see in the second half of this year.

Emails: We will be working those down this week. Sorry for the delay but it was all hands on deck to sort out the changes we wanted to make and the new software we wanted to implement. The implementation was bumpy but we are finally done. We also fixed some software modules that were a little buggy.

Over the years I have struggled to get information about running projects out to customers in a clear and direct way. Normally I do this through our forum on WUS but frankly it has proved to be less than the ideal medium for this. The updates generally get lost in a blizzard of posts, questions, suggestions, and answers. This is fine if you are an avid follower of our forum but based on a phone call I got from a customer right before Basel it is obvious that not everyone wants to receive their information through the forum. The other alternative is email but unfortunately this isn’t practical either since the more emails I send the more likely they will be caught in SPAM filters and some customers do not appreciate being updated in this way. What’s more it costs money these days to send email updates.

I am happy to announce that we have come up with what I think is a new and better way to communicate the information. My wife and I developed two info-graphics that we will be using to communicate project updates. Together with the graphic we will be posting project updates on our site in the News sections rather than on the forum. We will still keep a forum but it will be reserved for discussion purposes of features and design elements of the ongoing projects – which is more in keeping with the spirit and purpose of a “forum”. We have created the info-graphics for the Project 300 and GMT already and here is what the graphic looks like:

Hopefully the graphic is self-explanatory. Regarding ordering for example we will notify customers via email that are on the mailing list and update this graphic. For most updates we will only use the graphic. When more granular updates that don’t fit the graphic are required we will use the News section for the respective projects. This way everyone hopefully gets a quick and complete view of the status of the project as well as the status of ordering and delivery.

For delivery in particular we will create a graphic seen below, which is the one we are currently using for the PMWF Graywater deliveries. Essentially we will either do it by order, sequence, or serial number. In the case of the Graywater the graphic is organized by serial number:

I hope that this new procedures is intuitive to the point it seems stupid that we haven’t always done it this way. In a sense though I am a bit embarrassed that I hadn’t come up with this sooner but sometimes the simplest seeming things are the hardest to come by.

We are currently in the pre-production stage. The samples have been delivered and we are working out a few last details before we give the go ahead for mass production. At this point we hope to begin mass production before the end of this year with the target of re-launching the Stingray in the first half of 2014.

Many have asked and yes the Tornek-Rayville is coming back. It will be based on the Stingray II but feature a several upgrades to the standard.

If you would like to receive updates regarding the new Stingray please either check back, follow our forum, or you can sign up for our e-mail newsletter (If you already signed-up this is the same list, we are just re-posting the sign-up form):

This e-mail distribution list is not tied to any other e-mail lists that we use. If you sign up for this distribution list you will not receive any other e-mails regarding other Mk II products unless you are already on that list or have explicitly signed up for a different distribution list.

We are currently of out of the Stingray and are delivering the last of the watches ordered before we suspended ordering last year. I am currently working on a new version of the Stingray which I hope will be re-launched early next year.

If you would like to receive updates regarding the new Stingray please either check back, follow our forum, or you can sign up for our e-mail newsletter:

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This e-mail distribution list is not tied to any other e-mail lists that we use. If you sign up for this distribution list you will not receive any other e-mails regarding other Mk II products unless you are already on that list or have explicitly signed up for a different distribution list.